In present day point-of-sale (POS) transactions involving payment by check, the MICR indicia that are to appear on the check of a customer are added after the sale, and at a remote location, i.e., either at the bank, or in a separate (back room) at the retail site.
For the first time, this invention seeks to eliminate the role of the bank in supplying the required MICR indicia on a check presented for POS payment at a retail establishment. Owing to its new function, machines now being designed by the present assignee of this invention, must be able to encode and read MICR located in one or more specific fields of the check.
In a MICR encoder of the new machine, the MICR characters must be printed at a precise distance to the right edge of the check in order to place the MICR in the proper field site in accordance with strict ANSI and/or ISO specifications. In order to accomplish this, an optical sensor is provided to detect the edge of the check and stage it at a known location from the thermal, MICR printhead. It then becomes an easy matter to advance the check a predetermined distance by a stepper motor drive in a fixed number of step increments in order to start the printing sequence.